Tag Archives: writing

Gag writing AMITS over the week has given me a bit of fun material to work with, but it feels too much like I’m stalled again. I’ve given the project a month and it’s in a far better place now, but I’m getting bored with it again and I want to work on something a bit more spontaneous.

So I’m starting another interim project this weekend and giving myself until the first weekend of October to finish it off. It’s another step along from the abstract freeform happy times of RYGCBMK◯ towards the more structured story of AMITS.

Just like RYGCBMK◯ there’s a set of rules for me to follow, key among which is that I am to make all of it up as I go along, scene by scene. No planning ahead is allowed. If I try to work out an ending in advance, I’m instantly barred from actually using it.

A pin diagram of the MCP6002 linear op amp. Not shown: capriciousness.

AMITS is showing signs of life too! It’s helping a lot that I’m much less uptight about whether it’s going to turn out “good” anymore. RYGCBMK◯ has been useful for that: there hasn’t been much in the way of interest and that takes the mental pressure off. The positive reactions I got from RYGCBMK◯ have encouraged me to tap some of that same merry energy for AMITS. I feel like it’s better for me to just have fun with this and get that fun up on screen.

I drafted a new story pass in note form last Sunday and it’s looking promising! Pointy’s upbeat personality is so much nicer to work with than his previous stupid/mean incarnations. His new attitude means the story flows more straightforwardly, the pace is swifter, the energy level is higher, the humour is spread across both action and dialogue… it’s a good start!

The middle section of the movie sees Pointy meeting a “laser robot”. Pointy’s nerdy excitement for all things laserly and robotic becomes disappointment as the robot turns out to be a malfunctioning dud. Accordingly, I’ve been coming up with unimpressive stuff for the robot to do all week. The ideas so far are unusable, but that’s ok – experience has taught me that usable ideas come from unusable ideas and I just have to keep pushing through it patiently without falling in love with any single gag too much.

The goal here is to create a large pool of ideas then select the ideas which fit together the best while maintaining the tone I want. Having a solid grasp of the movie’s tone removes a major source of indecision for me, and indecision is a big part of why this isn’t done yet.

Here is the metaphorical pool of ideas I am trying to create. Starfish pattern optional.

That’s all for now. Time to catch up on the last of the soldering before the next salvo of Eurorack kits get here…

It’s been 30 April to 6 May 2017 and A moment in the Sun: Robot is back in development again.

I drafted a new synopsis this week with a fresh take on Pointy as an utter geek for robots as long as they have lasers. I like this new arrangement of two upbeat characters in a situation as opposed to an upbeat character versus a grumpy character.

If Pointy’s seeking out Gronky for his cool robots, as opposed to wandering through the desert aimlessly, there’s much less to introduce and set up, which means the pace is sped up considerably and there’s less movie to make. It also fits together more organically as a story – Gronky’s job of burying stuff in the desert stays the same and even has some relevance to why Pointy meets up with him.

Not much else to cover this week – the day job has been super-draining – so please enjoy this Australian comedy sketch featuring cult favourite Milo Kerrigan (played by Shaun Micallef) attempting to cook a chicken and destroying both the set and the script in the process.

Time to recap 12 to 18 February 2017. This week I’ve focussed more on getting well than making stuff.

I got the pitchamatic for the second and third part of the movie cut together and put it in front of a couple of reviewers. The feedback I’ve got is that things are weirder than before but still funny. Funny-weird is fine by me. 🙂

After months of not having the story in video form, it’s great to see the characters up and moving again. Even from that I’m getting new insights into where the characters come from, and the kind of story I’m telling is much clearer. Hopefully that clarity will assist with the tricky task of writing the introduction.

Alas. Job stress, anxiety, lack of restful sleep and other stuff have made it hard to maintain a clear creative vision of what I want. My brain is just too unsettled and preoccupied to really focus. It’s far from ideal.

Figure 1. What it’s been like on the inside of my head lately.

Without a good sense of what I’m aiming for, I’m liable to get stuck in endless tweaking and trying other things. (“Do I like this? How about this? Do I like anything?)” Even with that vision, I could be super attached to a particular idea one day, then dump it for a new idea which makes the story more concise and interesting but gives me more work to do. (“Did it really need to be changed?”)

Anyway. Instead of floundering and tweaking and getting nowhere in a cloud of self-doubt, I’m writing down prospective in unstructured point form as an idea bank. I know I have particular plot points to hit – points like “Gronky meets Pointy”, “Pointy is lost”, etc – but it’s more pragmatic to bank interesting little ideas that I don’t have to commit to rather than trying to piece together something bigger (or tweak something that already exists), especially without a strong notion of what I’m aiming for.

Little things I can do. Big things will just have to wait until I’m feeling up to it.

It’s been 5 to 11 Feb 2017. It’s a quick entry this week by contrast to last week’s 19th Century Russian novel!

I was working on the introduction again this week. I had an outline I liked. I scribbled thumbnails down one side of it on Sunday (see header image) and I was feeling really good about it. I even tweeted that I had it. I let it sit for the mandatory day or two and – surprise surprise – it’s not where it needs to be.

Getting carried away with early drafts happens, but it doesn’t help that I’m also going through a rough patch right now. I’m dealing with way higher stress levels at the day job than normal; I’m staying back late at work much more often. Even figuring out how to make the new employment arrangements work effectively has been a challenge, let alone getting work done. It’s severe enough that I’ve been in counselling for anxiety for a few weeks – it’s helping, but there’s a lot to work through. Unseasonably winterish weather here in Perth with record low tempeatures and rainfall isn’t helping matters either, since I’m very much a summer person.

So with all that’s been going on, I’ve been especially wiped out and it’s made me super indecisive. So instead of getting bummed out with aimless tweaking work on the introduction, I’m going back to the layout images I already have to create a pitchamatic (narrated storyboard video). Seeing the second part of the movie unfold in video form should give me a much more tangible sense of what I need to introduce and how, and it’ll be encouraging to see Pointy and Gronky do their thing again. 🙂

It’s been 29 January to 4 February 2017. I wrapped up the last of the layout images late on Saturday evening so it was finally time to re-attack the intro again.

This entry is necessarily text heavy, but I’ve inserted some pictures of Australian animals to break the text up a bit.

“How can I turn this two-scene epic into something quicker and funnier…”

At the start of the rewrite, I had two scenes to condense.

There was an opening scene in the desert where the two characters start apart from one another. Pointy has lost his car and is stumbling around blindly looking for it by clicking his immobiliser remote and listening for the “doot doot”. Pointy is literally blind because the sun really hurts his eye when he opens it for more than a fraction of a second. Meanwhile, Gronky has just finished burying Pointy’s car because that’s what he does (burying things). They eventually find one another (hence last week’s “doot doot” remark). Pointy ends up in shadow and can open his eyes again. He asks if Gronky can see a car. Gronky can’t see a car around anywhere. Pointy throws his keys away and asks how Pointy asks how to get out of the desert. Gronky buries Pointy’s keys and Pointy realises Gronky buries stuff. It’s implied that Gronky agrees to help Pointy because of what happens in the next scene.

The next scene was the original opening of “Robot”. Gronky is singing into his beatbox radio thing for fun and Pointy is impatiently asking how long it’ll take to get to the bus stop. Gronky is dancing around having fun in blissful ignorance of Pointy’s discomfort. Pointy is having trouble keeping up and gets blinded by the sun because he can’t manage to stay in Gronky’s shadow. Pointy finally puts his foot down and says either Gronky calms down and shows him to the bus stop in a sensible way or Gronky can dig up something for shade that he can take with him. Gronky considers a few options which he’s previously buried, decides on one of them and then pulls out his shovel.

Cut to the robot being dropped onto the desert floor. (Everything from this point on has been through layout.)

Here is a picture of a tammar wallaby for making it through those two giant walls of text.

Wallaby break!

I made little cuts here and there to things that didn’t matter. A big win came from changing the sequence of events to make certain actions overlap.

As originally written, Pointy sees which direction Gronky’s pointing in before he wanders over to bury the keys. From that the audience understands that Gronky is instrumental to Pointy getting to the bus stop, but they can see it’s not going to be straightforward.

I rewrote it so that when Pointy throws his keys away in frustration, Gronky instantly sets off to bury them and Pointy is blind again – Pointy doesn’t even get to see where Gronky is pointing anymore. But he still convinces Gronky to take him to the bus stop. Cue the second scene with them walking. Cue the robot dropping to the ground.

This was helpful (and much funnier) but I had a feeling I could take even more out of the story.

Here’s an unrelated picture of an owl getting a scratch on the head to give your eyes another rest.

Owl break!

Somehow I got to the idea that Gronky didn’t feel like being helpful. Instead of taking Pointy towards the bus stop, he points in a particular direction cheerfully and leaves Pointy to it. Pointy asks if Gronky can take him and instead, Gronky says no. Pointy is suddenly facing the prospect of blindly walking in a direction and hoping for the best. He loses his temper at Gronky’s lack of helpfulness and asks sarcastically if there’s anyone else who can show him to the bus stop. Gronky then is reminded of something.

But it still felt a little undercooked and not ready for thumbnailing yet. So I looked for some more comic opportunities and found them in the situation itself. It’s annoyingly difficult to convey them in text however because the simultaneity of it all makes it look like a complete jumble of activity.

In addition to asking Gronky the way to the bus stop, Pointy’s also trying to get back into Gronky’s shadow, except Gronky keeps moving out of the way because Pointy’s behaving strangely, almost turning the scene into a game of chasey. Pointy is also depending on Gronky to get him out of the desert, so he doesn’t want shout at him to bloody well stay still so he can get back into Gronky’s shadow to see which direction Gronky is pointing, and yet Gronky is not being co-operative at all.

With that extra bit of polish, I think I’ve got a scene. Hopefully that first scene plays out more funny than painfully irritating. 🙂

The bettong didn’t make it to the end of the post. I hope you did!

So I hope this little tale of rewriting and polish has been interesting! I want get started on thumbnails tomorrow before heading back to my dayjob on Monday where it promises to be an interesting but exhausting week. So hopefully tomorrow is nice and distraction-free. 🙂

And now for a little 22 to 28 January 2017. It’s a long-ish post this week so I’ve put in lots of layout pictures to break up the text. 🙂

This week I started layout on the scene where we meet the robot for the first time.
There’s literally two more shots left in that scene to do layout for and I may even get to those later today. Hooray! I even managed to avoid doing a minor rewrite earlier this week after I spotted a conflict between staging and continuity. Hooray! 🙂

“Amazing! A rewrite was averted! Full water vapour is ahead!”

Once the robot intro scene is laid out, I’m going back to the opening scene that I started layout on at the end of December 2016. I was having trouble staying motivated so I halted layout work on the introduction and cut my teeth on the more fun scenes towards the end of the movie instead. It was a good move, because now every scene except the introduction is laid out (aside from those two shots but who’s counting?)

I like how “Robot” has come together – it’s anarchic and silly and quirky and fun. The “introductory” scene on the other hand has a few too many problems to ignore:

the story just blips in out of nowhere

the “intro” feels like an escalation scene, not an establishing scene

it doesn’t have the same tone as the rest of the story, so it doesn’t set the tone like a good introduction should

we don’t really get to know the characters or understand their relationship to one another (also a note I got from “Sombrero”) which can be a sticking point for some audience members

it uses characterisations which are more “Sombrero” than “Robot”

the focus is Gronky goofing off, but should be more on Pointy’s struggle to fit the rest of the story

nothing particularly funny happens, though it is kind of playful and cute which I’ve discovered is an acceptable stand-in for funny – but funny is better!

it doesn’t set up gags and cause-effect scenarios which play out later, not as strongly as it should at least

it also sets up ideas which don’t pay off

I never actually finished writing it – there’s “insert gag here” panels in the thumbnail sheet, and doing those gags is going to take a lot of time

somehow it’s still over-long

When I wrote it back in December, I was trying to give the story a concise introduction to keep the running time down. However, mere conciseness isn’t enough! A lean introduction is great, but not if it misses setting the right tone, meeting the characters and their situation properly while keeping the tone funny and sweet and a little bit quirky. There’s only one thing to do.

There’s another good reason to rewrite the introduction but it takes longer to explain:

I got notes at Blender Conference 2016 about “Sombrero” (thanks Colin!) about how Pointy’s problem was repeatedly being solved then unsolved to create another problem. It made the pacing very stop-start. In “Robot”, the only time Pointy’s problem gets solved with any certainty is at the end. To do that, any solutions to Pointy’s problems have to be an obvious, unacceptable compromise upfront. That compromise isn’t obvious in the intro at all, and to make it adequately obvious I have to shift the focus of the scene dramatically. Frankly, the scene isn’t that amazing that I feel a need to salvage it in its entirety. More than anything, the start of the story wants a re-think.

And it’s already begun to get one! I mentioned last week that I started thumbnailing a new introduction. I’m going to develop that as the new opener, if for no other reason than I think it’ll be cute when Gronky imitates a car immobiliser, much to Pointy’s confusion.

Roughly by the middle of 27 November to 3 December 2016, the project had reached a crisis point. After a month of rewriting, tinkering and procrastination on “Sombrero” since Blender Conference 2016, progress had ground to a halt. I’d completely lost confidence that I could deliver “Sombrero” next year – injuries, stress from the office job and family-related stuff are already pain points in my life, and I didn’t want Pointy and Gronky standing in the same queue bringing me down.

After about twelve months of development, I’ve shelved “Sombrero”.

I rethought things with the new central notion that this project is meant to be a fun and fulfilling use of my spare time. and I want a movie to show for it next year. So on Wednesday I downscoped the project to tell a shorter, funner and funnier story.

There’s a lot of fun to work with already. Gronky and his playful antics are already fun. The consequences of Pointy’s characteristic lack of forethought should also be fun. But that bloody hat just wasn’t bringing the fun.

So now there’s a robot. It’s a very helpful robot – at least, it’s trying to be helpful…

The new story is much shorter. I’m retaining the characters as is and snatching up fun ideas from previous rewrites and generally avoiding the foul Gordian Knot of character motivation and story logic that comes with sustaining a longer film, so AMITS is back to being short and sweet and weird and funny, like it should be.

So it’s a fond but possibly overdue goodbye to “A moment in the Sun: Sombrero”, and a warm hello to “A moment in the Sun: Robot”. 🙂

That was 18 to 26 November 2016 – a slow week. There was a family emergency from the previous Saturday to recover from. The weather turned properly summery (37C today) which means taking it nice and easy. The characters are somewhat in flux and Pointy is still having his identity crisis. But let’s ignore that little blue ham for a second.

There’s a few shots in the old reel where Gronky is digging with his hands. Placeholder dirt is being thrown into the air behind him. During the review sessions at Blender Conference 2016, more than one person asked “What’s he doing? Is he casting a spell or something?” – what do you think?

Behold, the mystery of the metaball particle system

It hit me this week that I’m not using props to communicate intent very much. If Gronky goes to dig then surely he should pull out a shovel – that way people instantly know what he’s doing. And if he pulls a shovel out of malletspace, all the better to say what kind of character he is and what kind of universe the movie takes place in.

There’s effort involved in making a prop like a folding shovel, but if it means a less confused audience, it’s worth it. It’s also a welcome respite from the more open-ended task of rewriting.

And I thought, well, if Gronky’s going to carry a shovel around with him, I want him to have The Best Shovel Ever. If you haven’t heard of the Chinese Military Shovel, multifunction tool of Internet legend, you’re in for a treat. 🙂

I’ve even got an actual Chinese Military Shovel here to reference for modelling. Spiders have laid eggs in the spade bit but other than that it’s fine.

It’s been 13 to 19 November 2016. Between inhaling large chunks of “Independent Animation” and settling back in at the ol’ day job, it’s been a week of rewriting, retooling and experimenting.

I restated the story beats and compiled a shot list early in the week. For an attempt to condense the film and cut the fat, It still felt too much like reshuffling what was there instead of compressing it. I expected something much more streamlined – less shots, less pauses in the action, less to do. After that early misstep, it turned into a rewrite week where I zeroed in specifically on issues of character motivation and pacing.

The task before me is to condense and arrange the events of the story to get the right tone, pacing, character interaction and comedy. It is very tricky. I’ve settled into the groove of rewriting in passes, seeing what I like and most importantly making no assumptions that any new rewrite will be The One.

I’ve found that the trick is to have a specific problem to solve (e.g. solving lumpy pacing by spreading out the introduction and revelation of certain things), and to not to get desperately attached to anything like thinking “YES! THIS will be the one where everything will finally come together!” before I’ve even started that draft.

Unfortunately the rapidly changing requirements of the story has meant that poor old Pointy’s had a bit of an identity crisis, shifting from self-proclaimed Zen master to inexplicably (but consistently) angry little man and many steps inbetween. Hopefully the coming week will be kinder for everyone. 🙂